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Guardian and Zeit online articles attract a large number of reader comments in general
and those that include links specifically. Using both quantitative and qualitative content
analysis, the reader comments that include links in 80 articles on four topics – The
Refugee Crisis, the Syrian Conflict, Elections and Artificial Intelligence – from both
newspapers were classified according to type and pro or contra stance to the article they
were posted in response to.
The aim was to discover whether a majority of these comments agreed with or opposed
the main premises of the articles they were responding to and to determine whether
different topics results in different reactions. In addition to that the goal was to try and
ascertain whether these findings indicated falling trust in journalists or not, and what
readers sought to achieve by commenting and posting links, if in fact they had a concrete
motivation.
Findings demonstrated that 61.1% of reader comments with links disagreed with the
articles they were posted to, and controversial topics were more likely to attract links by
readers and greater disagreement. Previous research and this study could not clearly
conclude whether audience trust in journalists is falling or whether that was a mere
extension of falling trust in authorities and organizations for example. It could also not
determine whether audiences comment and share links to effect some form of change or
whether they simply seek a platform to express their opinion without any conscious goal
in mind.